Hulk
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

USA, PG-13, 138 m, 2003
Directed by Ang Lee. Stars Eric Bana, Jennifer Connelly, Sam Elliott, et al.

Ang Lee’s Hulk successfully mingles the splashy layout of the time-honored Marvel comic book with the splintered configuration of a psychological thriller. Unlike last summer’s Spider-Man, which failed to offer up anything new in the retelling of the Web-Head legend, Hulk is almost gallant in its relative audacity to both honor the prerequisite in safeguarding the integrity of its title character and to breathe new life into the genre of superhero movies. Though experimental (at least in terms of this variety of filmmaking), Ang Lee’s irregular approach doesn’t undermine the material—the story of how Dr. Bruce Banner assumed the alter-ego of the green-skinned Goliath after an accidental overdose of gamma radiation is in surprisingly good hands here. Mind, Lee wouldn’t have been my first choice to helm a project like this. His previous efforts, which include the solemn snooze-fest The Ice Storm, suggested a director with too dour a worldview and too ponderous a style to bring the Day-Glo flourishes of a comic book to proper cinematic life. Maybe the producers referred to the director’s work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Tiger as evidence that he could pull off Hulk’s zanier action sequences with some panache, though the only qualification that I could spy was that he shared creator Stan Lee’s surname. But, hey, I thought Sam Raimi was an appropriate choice to direct Spider-Man, and we all know what a crashing bore that film turned out to be. Hulk is a much more serious film than Spider-Man, but it doesn’t forget to have fun, which is evident during an ingenious fight scene between the Hulk and a slavering pack of gamma-infected dogs. (It recalls the melee between the big ape and the attacking tigers in the original Mighty Joe Young.) Lee’s Hulk is the most off-center and thoroughly gratifying superhero movie since Tim Burton’s avant-garde classic Batman Returns. But although Hulk packs the emotional resonance of the first two Superman movies, its art-house sensibilities are bound to alienate casual moviegoers seeking out just another unlettered summer blockbuster. 

Truth be told, it’s something of a misnomer to characterize Hulk as a superhero flick—it has more in common with classic monster movies like King Kong, Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which obviously inspired the original comic) than it does with X-Men or Daredevil. It also sidesteps the campy, tongue-in-cheek humor that is usually associated with most superhero fare. But Hulk ain’t your average superhero because his alias perceives his powers as a curse, rather than an advantage, and will go to any length to keep from transforming into the beast locked within himself—a grotesque manifestation of a long-buried childhood nightmare. Flashes of the repressed memory of this key trauma keep springing up throughout the picture, and Lee approximates the tortured doctor’s frazzled mindset (further hindered by only fuzzy recollections of the Hulk’s mindless rampages) with the most creative use of split-screens since any one of Brian DePalma’s more idiosyncratic thrillers. It’s an inspired move; Lee is shrewdly blending comic book dynamics with the language of cinema, using the split-screens and freeze-frames to suggest cartoon panels. The marriage of the two mediums makes perfect sense: comic books and films are similar in how they use a wildly varying succession of pictures to tell a story. 

As a kid, “The Incredible Hulk” was my favorite comic book, so you better believe that I rarely missed a Friday evening of Kenneth Johnson’s live-action TV adaptation. Lou Ferrigno brought a great deal of humanity to the role of the Hulk, but the series’ budgetary constraints limited the writers to figuring the Hulk into situations that were scaled much smaller than the epic yarns Hulk found himself in on any given page of Stan Lee’s comic. (CBS’s “The Incredible Hulk” was fashioned after “The Fugitive” with pesky reporter Jack McGee forever dogging Dr. David Banner a la FBI agent Samuel Gerard’s tireless pursuit of Dr. Richard Kimble.) With the evolution of computer-generated SPFX, the time’s ripe for a big-screen treatment of ol’ Greenskin because even the wildest of his adventures can now be realized cinematically. But Lee must also have a certain fondness for the comparatively quaint 70s TV show for Lou Ferrigno has a cameo as a security guard (as does Stan Lee), and Johnson’s most famous line of dialogue, “Don’t make me angry…You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” is spoken at the film’s end. 

Eric Bana, though he’s no Bill Bixby, does a serviceable job playing Dr. Bruce Banner. Fathered by a mad scientist (Nick Nolte) who experimented upon his own DNA code, Banner was bequeathed with genes of a highly combustible nature. Unwittingly following in his father’s footsteps, Banner’s study of gamma radiation results in a catastrophe that helps to transform him into the rampaging Hulk that was always dormant inside of him. The monster’s hairy vigor is tested when his dad returns after thirty years in a military lock-up (he was thought dead all the while), and uses his son’s research to alter his own body chemistry, allowing him to take on the shape of whatever he touches. In the comic book, this supervillian was known as the Absorbing Man, and though the clashes between him and the Hulk in this film are exciting, they’re all too brief, and the character’s astonishing powers feel underused. 

Bruce’s love interest, Dr. Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly), is the daughter of General “Thunderbolt” Ross (Sam Elliot), whose oddly single-minded fixation on destroying the Hulk stems from the man’s contempt of the young doctor’s father. The two gruff military men repeatedly clashed back in the day, and it was the General’s decision to shut down the elder Banner’s loony experiments that resulted in a disaster that wound up killing Bruce’s mother and sending his father to the pokey. Nolte and Elliot have a high ol’ time snarling and yapping at the camera, but it’s Connelly’s understated performance as Dr. Ross that gives the film the soothing measure of sobriety it needs. Connelly, exceptionally thin here, is beginning to look almost elfin, which I guess makes her an ideal mate for a lime-colored troll. 

I had feared that making the Hulk completely computer-generated wouldn’t be as effective as using a painted muscleman in the role, but I’m happy to report that the effect is largely successful, particularly in close-ups of the green brute’s lumpy countenance. Actually, rendering the Hulk in CG form isn’t all that different than bringing the title character in the 1933 King Kong to life with stop-motion photography. (This Hulk isn’t far from that creature’s size either.) But I must admit that using an oversized thespian in a moth-eaten monkey-suit in the 1976 remake of Kong made the love-struck simian more emotionally accessible. The same is true for Hulk: We don’t feel the same degree of empathy for Ang Lee’s misunderstood monster as we did for dear Lou Ferrigno’s touching portrayal of what remains, at least in my mind, the real Hulk.   

July 11, 2003

 © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.